We just launched our new brand on Instagram!

When we set out to create the Pluto brand, we wanted to reflect our philosophy of doing things differently. We wanted to shake up the conservative feeling of insurance, and stand out as a distinctive brand, regardless of the industry.

We worked with OM_D to bring this brief to life. We didn’t like the idea of a single variant of the logo, with a couple of colours. So we came up with 6 bold colour variations that could be used interchangeably. And as we couldn’t rely on a primary colour to represent our brand identity, we designed a set of hand-crafted brand shapes that can be used across all touchpoints, in various guises, to reinforce the unique Pluto brand identity. The whole brand system gives enough flexibility to craft recognisable and distinct brand experiences, across a wide range of touchpoints, both online and offline.

Head over to our Instagram page to see the brand in action, and read more about the process.

We worked closely with Olly at OM_D to craft our new brand identity. Head over to their website to read their take on the brand.

Getting the word out

We’ve also been busy telling everyone about Pluto, because why not!

Over the last month our CEO, Alex, has been making noise at a number of conferences and events:

• At InsurTech Rising Europe he sat on a panel and talked all things chatbots. Key takeaway, for a successful chatbot, keep things simple and structured
• Next was Insurance 3.0, straight up pitching for 💰 and telling the Pluto story. Key takeaway, we’re starting to think about our seed round in early 2019
• Finally, the Mayor of London’s TechInvest, awesome to be picked as 1 of 10 companies to present to 130 Angel investors. Key takeaway, we’re starting to get lots of interest from Angels. Check out the main man in action below…

Buried in code

We’ve been very busy building behind the scenes in the run up to our launch in early November. This means coding, and lots of it. We’ve scaled up our development team to 4 now to accelerate things. We want to launch, we want to learn.

A few key things we’ve built and got working this month are:

• Payment, can’t be a business without it. We’re going to support cards (obviously), PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay, so you can pay the way you like
• APIs, the lifeblood of any tech product. We’ve got APIs for /users, /policies, /claims, /discounts and on and on…more on our tech setup in a later post
• Content management (sometimes called a CMS), if we’re going to provide easy to understand insurance, it means we need to be able to build custom policies that contain relevant information only (unlike insurance policies today that cover everything and then some)
• Pricing engine, a personal favourite of our CTO who developed this over a rainy weekend (no pun intended). When you tell us about you, your trip and about the parts of your policy you want to tailor, we crunch the numbers and provide a quote just for you

If everything goes well, our next update in November will be announcing our launch and showing off our beautiful dwarf planet, Pluto. Until next month 👋